


Repetition in Practice

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Alternate Universe - World War II, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 12:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14020359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.The Blue Lion waits for her Paladin.





	Repetition in Practice

**Author's Note:**

> **Originally written for the Starboy Zine, in collaboration with[legendarydesvender](http://legendarydesvender.tumblr.com/). Her art for it can be found [here](http://legendarydesvender.tumblr.com/post/172012128574/i-forgot-to-post-this-oops-but-here-are-my).  **

 

**Antioch, 1430. The Byzantine Empire.**

 

Lance rides out past the citadel guards and into the dawn light. Face shadowed by his hood, turning his bones into something birdlike - that is, something hollow - he could be anyone. His father is on the Council, his sisters cut veiled swathes through dimly-lit rooms, and it wasn’t until the siege last year that Lance learnt how hunger felt. He is the second boy - an heir and a spare, that’s what they say. A thing kept just in case. Unbridled each morning until he returns to the citadel, hears the gates closing shut behind him, and steps back into being what he was born to: namely, his father’s son.   

Freedom is a concept best left to poetry. 

He spots the other horse - lone, riderless, racing towards him - and his heart stops dead in his chest.  _ Cru-sa-der: _ three syllables. One for the sound of your city alight. One for your family still on the ground. 

The third, of course, is your turn. 

Lance has been in border skirmishes since he was sixteen. He’s too old for this fear, he’s sure, but somehow, it ages with him. He quiets his own ride, slowing her to a canter, chasing down the stray horse until he can see his own face, reflected in the panic-blind of her eyes. 

“Hey, girl,” he croons, leaning halfway out of his own saddle; reaching out his hand to her mane, the dark lacquer of her coat. He starts, but isn’t wholly surprised, to see his hand come away tinged with blood. It’s not hers. 

Three syllables. He suppresses a shiver. 

“You’re safe,” he lies, one eye on the horizon, searching for anything encroaching. “Are you looking for someone?” 

He hears a whistle, realises it’s human, and leans back just as the horse whips around, making for a nearby copse of trees at a gallop. Lance follows, pulling at his bow, the wood and the notch of it an anchor. 

“Come out,” he says. His voice shakes, but his hands are steady. He calculates how many could be hidden in the leaves. The odds aren’t on his side, or his city’s. His heartbeat stretches and slows as he pulls back on the arrow, taut. “Come out or I’ll - I’ll shoot your horse.”

He doesn’t think he’ll be able to, if it comes to it. He doesn’t have to. A man stumbles from the trees. He reaches out a hand to shield his eyes: it’s made of wood. Lance can see the leather strapping it to his shoulder. Blood, matted in his hair, dyes the white shock of it. 

The dark of his eyes familiar. Lance chokes on an inhale. His hands waver. He drops his bow to the ground. 

“Shiro?” he whispers. It’s been a year. They’ve said prayers for him. “Shiro, is that -”

Shiro opens his mouth to reply, but faints at Lance’s feet instead. 

 

**London, 1851. The Great Exhibition.**

 

Keith is waiting for him around the corner past Lyle’s. Out of costume, still attracting stares, he’s glaring after a pair of giggling sisters. Their eyes catch on his, the dark of them blacklit above his burgundy collar: a chiaroscuro boy. That’s what Lance had thought, the first time he’d seen him, stood in front of Hong Kong’s display, blatantly bored, the light streaming in through the endless glass ceilings striking off his hair. A boy made out of chemicals and experiments. Both, of course, used to be called magic. The cut of his smile, when he looks up into Lance’s face, is sharp. 

“Is this another one of your stupid ideas?” Keith drawls, falling into step as Lance weaves through the streets. He sighs to himself. “It’s another one of your stupid ideas.” 

_ You never say they’re stupid afterwards,  _ Lance thinks but doesn’t say. There’s things they don’t talk about. In five months, the Exhibition is over. Lance is counting down the days until he sees the shoreline again. What Keith is counting down to, he doesn’t say. He says he’s a church orphan, but Lance has never seen him touch a Bible. Lance has a photograph in his billfold of his family in their Sunday best, his baby sister open-mouthed on his mother’s hip, their smiles bleached out by the sunlight. Keith has only leather and absence. They turn past dried lavender, fresh hazelnuts, pickpockets; a group of boys their age smoking cigarettes, all eyes. 

Lance is nineteen years old, the hours to home stretching out like taffy. When he writes letters home to his family, he doesn’t know how to tell them what London is like, the way the smog descends tide-like, the vapour of it nothing like sea-mist. When they’d advertised for the exhibition, the paper advertisement had been hot under Lance’s fingertips. Like a stone, it lodged into the back of his mind, whispering long after he’d sung his siblings to sleep. It whispered about a world  _ beyond _ . 

“Like you’re going to back out now,” Lance tells Keith. He stumbles on an uneven slab of pavement. Keith’s hand immediately snaps to Lance’s arm, white-knuckled against the navy of Lance’s coat, steadying him. 

“You don’t know your own limits,” Keith mutters. It’s a well-worn argument. “Somebody has to keep you falling off the edge of the world.”

“You don’t have to stay to watch me keep falling off.” 

Keith snorts under his breath. 

“There we are,” he says, “That’s it. That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. It has to be. I’m sure of it.” 

When Lance looks at him, Keith is glaring again, his mouth a stubborn line. 

“Oh,” he says. “Right.”

 

**Toronto, 1942. Allied Forces Airbase.**

 

Lance is going to be late for curfew. Again. He cuts across another of the outer fields, winding ever closer to the heart of the base, wincing as his boots sink into the mud. He’s going to have to get up ten minutes earlier than usual to clean them before inspection, but the other option is having Iverson catch him sneaking past the guard post, half an hour past curfew - 

And, Lance realises, as he tries to fix his uniform, an automatic reaction to thinking about Iverson’s face these days - he has lipstick on his collar. Make that twenty minutes earlier. When he scrubs the back of his mouth across his hand, it comes away sticky with misplaced scarlet. Yeah. Lance is taking the scenic route tonight. 

He creeps past the hangars, the rows of planes quiet and sleek like sleeping cats. The hangar doors are ajar. From the dim light that spills out of them and onto the concourse, he can see night duty engineers making their way back and forth. One of them catches his eye, looks him up and down, and wolf-whistles, long and low; the timbre of it linked somehow in Lance’s brain with the sense-memory of kissing the giggles out of a girl’s mouth at the back of the dancehall tonight, four dances in and drunk on the adrenaline of moving. Lance has never been able to stay still for long - or long enough. 

He isn’t even sure what he’s looking for, or if he’s looking for anything at all - the itch under his skin has been living there long before the war bled through Europe, until suddenly it was all on their doorstep too. He’d volunteered early. The U.S. Air Force needed bodies and he was a body, had papers from his mother. In the middle of a war, it wasn’t supposed to matter where he was from, only where he was going. Of course, it still mattered. It mattered in the mess hall, in liaison meetings, in coping with Keith and the way his pencil cut across the map, superior, like a surgeon instead of a navigator. It mattered. But for those few awful, magical minutes in the air - suspended and weightless, out of simulation, the taste of his heart, alive and beating, in his mouth - he almost didn’t care.  

He’s halfway to his barracks, when he catches sight of Pidge. She’s tucked against the hangar’s side, knees to chest, her brogue heels discarded by her side. When she looks up at him, her eyes are bleary, half-obscured behind the night-glint of her glasses. 

“Hey, buddy,” she mutters, and wipes at her face like Lance had done at his mouth. “Did she try and eat you?” 

Lance glares automatically, then blinks back. Pidge is picking at a hole in her nylons. Out of her pilot uniform, she’s always so much smaller, so much younger, with her brother’s letter folded up in her desk drawer to match her father’s.  _ Missing, presumed dead.  _

How do you get up each day with that? With the yawn of the unknowing? Pilots don’t have a long lifespan, but Lance knows if he makes it, there’s a home back down on the ground for him. 

“How long have you been out here?” Lance asks her. Pidge shrugs, not looking up from the hole she’s managed, the white of her knee shocking through the beige. She only looks up when he holds out his hand, then scowls. 

“I’m not touching that hand,” she snipes, at which point Lance realises it’s the one still covered with secondhand lipstick. He rolls his eyes,  holds out the other, and helps her up. She’s unsteady on her feet - Lance would bet it’s from the cold, sitting still too long, or both - but she scowls and snatches her shoes off the ground before Lance can lean down to grab them for her. 

“Come on,” he says, quiet, all breath, “Race you past the canteen.”

The female barracks are tucked along the fence - out of sight like they’re never out of mind - and Lance knows if he offers to walk her back, he’ll be overstepping on something of hers, some squashed and tender pride. Pidge is, in some ways, cut from the same strange cloth: she’s scared of what she’ll find if she slows down. Standing still is an impossibility.  

“What’s it worth?” she says, eyeing him slowly. 

“Knowing you’ve won,” he replies, and starts running first. 

 

**Arizona, 2058.**

 

The descent into the cave is like being plunged into night, the darkness closing over their heads like water. Lance grabs for Hunk’s hand and thinks furiously of Varadero, of a bedroom ceiling covered in small glow-in-the-dark stars. 

When he puts his hand to the wall, the markings old and deep under his fingertips, they begin to glow. Night lights; star-gazing; all of them ways to call someone back. All ways to call them home. 

There’s a strange humming under his feet. It’s like the world is holding its breath. Lance swallows around the feeling. It crackles in his throat. 

“You okay, my guy?” he whispers to Hunk, tugs him forward. Takes another step into the future. 

**Author's Note:**

> Some historical notes: 
> 
> The Crusades is not my best area in terms of general historical knowledge. I picked Antioch based on some brief research into a viable area, so apologies if it's not the case. Shiro's prosthetic arm - carved from wood with flexible finger joints - is real and currently exhibited at the _nationalmuseum_ in Berlin, Germany. 
> 
> The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition, was an international cultural exhibition held from May to October 1851 in the Crystal Palace (literally a glorified greenhouse built specifically for the event) in London, United Kingdom. (I originally had written 1870 as the date in the zine edition - sorry!) Whilst other countries were invited to exhibit, the Exhibition strove to prove British superiority - which is unsurprising, given Britain's state as an Empire and colonial force at the time. Six million people visited the Exhibition, which was equivalent to a third of the British population at the time. The surplus funds earned from it paid for the founding of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, all in London. They are still standing and operating today. 
> 
> There were several Allied air bases in Canada. The average lifespan of a Royal Air Force pilot during the worst fighting of the Second World War was a fortnight. I couldn't find an estimate for the American Air Force at the time of writing.


End file.
